Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.
Perhaps it isn’t enough to celebrate Earth Day once a year. Maybe we need to be thinking every day about what we need to do, where we go from here, and how we to face our future.
I believe that hope has a crucial role in healing, and in driving our engagement in effecting the deep transformation we need.
Studies have shown that, once 3.5% of a population becomes sustainably committed to nonviolent mass movements for political change, they are invariably successful. That would translate into 11.5 million Americans on the street, or 26 million Europeans. We’re a long way from that, but is it really impossible?
We argue for the Creaturely based not just on time but more importantly on the greater creativity and efficiency of nature’s ecosystems, compared with the limited vision and mixed record of human cleverness.
The wild native garden lays its stamp on us through its regional appropriateness. It changes us to something other than what we were. We settle in, become of the earth.
When we introduce Agroecology we tend to throw out our little phrase that it’s ‘a science, a set of practices, and a citizen’s movement’. No, no, no, Agroecology is far more than this.
Here are a few stories about adaptation, to give a feel for actions that flow out of this type of hope — a hope that includes a hard-won acceptance of the very real possibility of impending collapse.
Conventional economics describes acts of human kindness in entirely pejorative terms. They are variously classed as unproductive labour or labour that is resistant to productivity gains. The criticism runs across the whole gamut of personal, educational and creative services.
We focus here on two proposals for a Green New Deal that are politically viable today but also point us toward the deeper long-term change needed: (1) job training that could help repopulate the countryside and change how farmers work, and (2) research on perennial grain crops that could change how we farm.
There is much we simply don’t know about the continuity of life. Perhaps the wisdom we need most is already right before our eyes in the awesome wonder of the natural world, and all we need to do is open ourselves to it.
